Why Marriage Matters to Families/Children
By Dr. Mark Creech
The speech below was delivered by Dr. Mark Creech, executive director of the Christian Action League, at the second anniversary of the passing of North Carolina’s constitutional amendment to protect marriage as one man and one woman.
Recently, a friend pointed out to me an opinion-piece that I found most intriguing. I thought it might serve our time together well on this celebration of North Carolina’s Marriage Protection Amendment’s second anniversary. Allow me to share it with you, understandably, with a few innocuous edits in the service of time, none of which change the essence of the article. It reads:
“Every time I hear proponents of Same-Sex marriage telling me that they want the state to endorse and validate their relationships I think…..the state gets to entirely remake marriage, not as the man/woman/child model we’ve inherited from 10,000 years of history and across all cultures, but as an anything-goes irrelevant partnership agreement between adults.
“Only a man and a woman have children despite every fantasy the gender benders want us to believe. Every child has a right to that natural life. Same-Sex marriage wants us to ignore reality and children’s rights to a mother and a father. Marriage will be made irrelevant because this re-make says that, for the first time, children and parenthood has no natural place in marriage…
“In the eyes of the state, marriage will be about adults, not about a man and a woman committing to making and raising children.
“Politicians love [for LGBT persons] to believe [they] belong to some victim class so they can save [them]. I reject this notion…
“People get married for their own reasons, but we have marriage because marriage has meaning and does a vital job not just for individuals but for society. Claiming that equality demands that men and women be as interchangeable as Lego blocks shows you don’t understand men and women, marriage or much else. Profound ignorance is a poor basis for massive change.
“We can ignore reality all we want but the outcomes for children are not the same across all family models. Marriage of a man and a woman gives children the best chance. That doesn’t mean there are not great parents in other circumstances, just that the weight of evidence is stacked against them.
“Chocolate is good, more chocolate is better; living on chocolate would be great. [You see], you can get from one simple proposition to a wrong idea very fast. The politicians who say they will save the [LGBT Community] with Same-Sex marriage are doing just that.” [1]
These are profound statements about the purpose of marriage, the nature of men and women and their unique roles in life, the value of marriage to children and the culture in general, and the politics of marriage.
Who wrote these words? Was it the conservative evangelical Dr. James Dobson of the radio broadcast, Family Matters? Was it the traditionalist Christian commentator, Tim Wildemon of the American Family Association? Was it Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council – an organization that has been alleged (but erroneously so) to be a hate group? How about former presidential candidate, conservative Christian, Republican and Baptist minister, Mike Huckabee? Did any of these men write the opinion piece I read earlier?
No, you may be very surprised to learn that these words were penned by an openly gay man, Paddy Manning, a columnist who strongly speaks out to preserve traditional marriage in Ireland.
Paddy Manning’s words are not only powerful for what they say, but I suggest they are powerful for what they don’t say – they point to something that is latent in Manning and many within the gay community itself – something that gnaws at the inside of most of us – something that recognizes there is an inherent wrong with gay marriage – that there is something innately amiss about homosexual couples parenting children – something that creates a heartfelt uneasiness. It just doesn’t feel right. Despite the Bible’s prohibitions, as well as those of other major religions, there’s just something about the arrangement that continues to strike us as violating our own biology and what’s natural. [2]
That’s what the words of Paddy Manning don’t say, but certainly are implied in the unexpected circumstance of a gay man writing them.
My friends, how did we get to the place in our society where we would ignore such emotional stirrings of the conscience – such rational sentiments? How did we get to where it became necessary to pass a constitutional amendment to protect marriage as it has been understood for thousands of years?
I think Dr. Francis Schaeffer answered that question, when he said,
“People drift along from generation to generation, and the morally unthinkable becomes thinkable as the years move on.” [3]
Barney Frank, the renowned openly gay former congressman from Massachusetts, once asked concerning the intention of homosexual’s to legalize same-sex marriage, “Who are we hurting?” [4]
The answer to that question is everyone and everything. Let me be abundantly clear. Marriage is defined by the God of nature. It is the way our culture promotes monogamy and all of its social benefits. It’s the means for providing males and females a way to complement and serve each other’s characters, temperaments, and dispositions of masculinity and femininity in an experience of diversity that no other relationship possibly can. It assures that every child will have both a mother and a father, neither of which are irrelevant to a child’s life. All of this matters because these matters are at the very core of our existence.
Make no mistake. Gay activists are not simply asking for marriage equality, as they claim. What they want is a new national policy that legally declares that gender is irrelevant to marriage – that gender is irrelevant to the raising of children. And a policy of that kind turns nature itself on its head. [5]
We can no more violate God’s natural law for marriage and the family than we could violate the law of gravity and not be broken by the fall.
I celebrate with you today our state’s protection of marriage, as God intended it, as natural law demands it, one man and one woman. May God protect his first institution, marriage. And may the great state of North Carolina stay great because it continues to resist the madness of the current hour and maintains as our constitution provides,
“That marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this state.”
Resources:
[1] Manning, Paddy. “Never Hit on Vice-Squad – Why I’m Not for Same-Sex Marriage.” thickerthantalk.blogspot.com, 10 November 2013, http://thickerthantalk.blogspot.com/2013/11/this-piece-was-published-in-irish-daily.html
[2] Drawn from Lutzer, Erwin W. The Truth About Same-Sex Marriage. Chicago: Moody Press, 2004, pg.57
[3] Quote cited by Lutzer, Erwin W. The Truth About Same-Sex Marriage. Chicago: Moody Press, 2004, pg.57
[4] Lutzer, Erwin W. The Truth About Same-Sex Marriage. Chicago: Moody Press, 2004, pg. 68
[5] Dobson, James. Marriage Under Fire. Sisters: Multnomah Press, 2004, pgs. 102,103
